Posts categorized under: 2024-Fall

All good things come to an end (12/06)

There is no presentation this Friday. Instead there will be time to reflect on the past semester of MLRG, chat about the upcoming break and play the TAG card game that Thomas will be bringing. Hope to see you all there!

Thomas on discrete infinity (10/24)

The Discrete Infinity Argument is a central pillar of generative grammar. It posits that every natural language is an infinite set of finite structures. The argument rests on the observation that natural languages allow patterns such as (I know that you know that)+ John snores. I will contend that the …

Gödel's theorems: an incomplete journey (10/18)

Gary Mar and colleagues will present their project “A Year of Magical Thinking” that uses new media and AI to introduce students, as well as logicians, mathematicians, and linguists to the breadth and depth of Gödel’s Theorems. Gödel is widely regarded as the greatest logician of the 20th century …

Kenneth on agreement on multiple tiers (10/11)

This week Kenneth will be presenting his work on agreement on multiple tiers.

Often, agreement targets the closest DP to some functional head which bears the right features. But in some languages there are other hierarchies, such person/animacy, which outrank structural closeness. Kenneth shows how such hierarchies can be …

Anton on transducer continuity (09/13)

There has been lots of work over the last ~20 years situating the phonotactics of natural language in certain classes of subregular languages and finding logical, automata-theoretic and algebraic characterizations of these classes.

This has allowed linguists not only to better understand the cognitive nature of phonological generalizations but also …

M on compositional semantics (09/06)

This week M will be presenting original research on compositional semantics.

Although compositional semanticists tend to have a lot to say about the logical forms of lexical items and sentences, they tend to have a lot less to say about what truly makes their theory run: the nature of semantic …